Hating data centers has gone mainstream — a Jason Kelce ad asked Americans to mail jars of pee to the nearest AI facility, and opposition polls jumped from 49 to 75 percent this year. Governors have noticed: Hochul’s moratorium, Abbott’s audit, Shapiro’s guardrails. But the groundswell is splitting the labor movement down the middle.
- Building trades are all in: data centers are 2.3% of US construction spending (quadrupled since 2020), about one-third union — three times the industry rate — with NABTU partnerships at OpenAI, BlackRock, and Meta and a Stargate labor agreement
- Opposition wing: National Nurses United and the AAUP back the Sanders–AOC moratorium — “a public health crisis, an environmental crisis, and a workers’ rights crisis”
- The wedge is blue-collar vs white-collar: builders today vs displaced professionals tomorrow — a moratorium’s pause “lands entirely on the people who build”
- Water fears are often overstated (closed-loop cooling, under 1% of national consumption) but real in water-stressed regions; many impacts are design choices, not inevitabilities
Meanwhile community opposition blocked or delayed seventy-five projects worth roughly $130 billion in Q1 alone — record construction and record obstruction at once. The federal government won’t regulate AI directly, so construction became the battleground.
Hogan’s hopeful close: tech’s popularity has cratered, so the trades are negotiating from strength — project labor agreements, ratepayer safeguards, enforceable community benefits. Labor can trade its support for guardrails: “We’ll only build these if we can be reasonably assured they won’t kill us.” The trades control whether the infrastructure gets built — right now, the closest thing America has to an AI kill switch.